P (Agreement | Different Epistemologies) < 0.5

"Scott Wedman" kills the "Great Quant/Qual Debate of 2010" in a guest post at Abu's place by saying almost exactly what I said, but more succinctly and with more grace. If Abu had taken that tack originally there would have been no disagreement from anyone. Nobody thinks that quant analysis is flawless or that qual research is worthless; just that it has a lot to offer if done well.

As for humor... I don't think anyone missed anything. I don't think Abu would've been criticized by any of us if his post had been obviously humorous, and a few of us would've linked to it approvingly in that case. Abu was trying to cheekily make a substantive point, and the criticisms directed at him were at the substance, not the cheekiness*. It wasn't in good humor at all, or certainly didn't come across that way, since he's made very clear in the past how little use he has for quant/formal research. Considering that he's yet to point out which parts of his manifesto were sincere and which he was just joking about, I'm forced to think he's pulling the whole "Tell-an-offensive-joke-then-claim-you-were-kidding-when-people-get-offended" card. As Joshua Foust said in comments, "Just own it and move on, and people will care a lot less."

Anyway, now that we're all in agreement I'd like to encourage Exum to actually engage with the IR literature on his blog rather than ignoring it. If he thinks it's deficient, perhaps he can explain why and thereby improve the quality of research. If he thinks that there are applicable takeaways for policymakers, then his position as a leading policy blogger can help spread the word. It takes a bit more effort to be constructive, but that's where the value is. And if he did that on a regular basis then any broader criticisms he makes about the discipline will be better received. I doubt he'll take me up on that, but I'd be pleased if he did.

*Except for my point that, given the abject failure of policymakers who rely on their personal experience and "knowledge of a region" to make policy, I'd be hesitant to accuse quants of being full of hubris if I were him.

Who's Afraid of the IMF?

Emmanuel notices that multilateral lenders-of-last-resort are popping up in Europe and Asia, and wonders: why not scrap the IMF? A European lender could tailor its policies to European needs, by surveilling compliance with the Maastricht criteria, for example. Emmanuel also notes that European countries rarely have balance of payments problems, which is the ostensible purpose of the IMF. The Vreelander sees the move from international to regional multilateral institutions as just another sign of the times:

The European Monetary Fund is less of a big deal. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, European countries borrowed from the IMF and had to accept the conditions attached. With the United States as the largest shareholder of the IMF, this gave our country some influence over policy in Europe. But Europe turned away from the IMF a long time ago. With Greece flirting with the idea of turning to the IMF for a loan, Germany and France are moving to make the divorce more final; Europe will deal with European monetary affairs.

But this European monetary move adds impetus to other regional organizations, like the Chiang Mai Initiative for Asia, and the Banco del Sur for South America. Global governance going forward will be increasingly based along regional lines. The United States will no longer have as much influence - neither directly, nor through its influence at the IMF.

So, the United States needs a new leadership style. We should continue to invest regionally, promoting our relations with neighbors, Canada and Mexico. And we should look to lead the world by engaging multilaterally. The days of effective US unilateralism are over. Cooperation with friends is the key moving forward.

I agree with the general sentiments expressed by both, but I think we can go a little deeper as well. There is a lot of research supporting the claim that the U.S. influences the size and type of IMF lending. E.g., this paper by Oatley and Yackee argue that countries allied with the U.S. get larger IMF loans, this paper by Randall Stone argues that U.S. allies can (sometimes) leverage that relationship to receive fewer conditions on their loans. If the goal is to decrease the influence of the U.S. and increase the influence of local/regional governments, then these patterns of increasing regionalization make sense.

But there is also another dynamic (other than the fact that the ASEAN+3 and eurozone are not the whole world) at play that suggests that the IMF will be around for quite awhile: it can provide needed political cover for leaders to enact unpopular reforms. This is especially true if the IMF is controlled by the U.S. Let's think about the Greece situation in this way: if Greece installs an austerity program in exchange for loans from Germany, then voters who dislike the plans in Greece and Germany know exactly where to aim their disapproval: incumbents. But if Greece is required to install an austerity program in exchange for an IMF loan -- even if the IMF loan is funded by Germany -- then domestic political leaders can argue that they had no choice in the matter: the Big Bad IMF made them do it. In this case, as it often is, opacity is a good thing for leaders enacting unpopular reforms, and including the IMF can muddy the water.

(Note: Vreeland has a paper on this topic, which he forgot to cite in his post. Blogging is all about self-promotion, James! Don't make me do your laundry for you.)

Now, it appears that Germany wants to make the domestic political costs for needing debt bailouts very high. In other words, Germany doesn't want to provide any political cover for Greece, for fear that if there are no consequences for being profligate then they'll just go back to profligacy. If this is true, then the political cover dimension of the IMF is a very strong reason to want to move policy away from that organization, since the "political cover" aspect of the IMF is essentially encouraging moral hazard. But there are potentially very high costs for German leaders as well: I doubt that German voters appreciate having to bail out foreign governments during an economic downturn. If leaders in Germany are punished for spending German funds to keep Greece (and Portugal, and Spain, and Ireland) afloat, then I think we'll see those nations scrambling to re-strengthen the IMF. The unpopularity of the IMF can actually work in the Fund's favor, in this case.

The takeaway? The U.S. may not able to act be able to act unilaterally as much anymore, but that does not guarantee that global governance must become more fractured. There may be political incentives to keep international organizations international, rather than regionalizing or localizing them.

Checking in with the Fed

Remember when Obama didn't nominate anybody to work with Geithner at the US Treasury at the height of the financial crisis? That was weird. It's a bit better these days, but we now have the same problem at the Fed. Three of the seven Board positions will be vacant within a few months, at a time when the Fed is walking a policy tightrope and could presumably use all the help it can get.

DeLong and Wessel round up the usual suspects. This isn't exactly my area of expertise, but I like the idea of Frederic Mishkin (who's been there before), David Romer, and a senior researcher (Wessel and DeLong like John Williams or Jeffrey Fuhrer, who I know nothing about but sounds good to me). Another possibility? Brad DeLong. Please leave Janet Yellen where she is.

In lighter Fed news, Jodi Beggs at Economists Do It with Models points us to LOLfed, from which the above picture was ripped.

Nerd humor. Gotta love it.

I'm Losing My Religion: Methods as Fetish

(Disclaimer: The majority of my published research employs statistical analysis. Everything I am currently working on employs statistical analysis. )

R.E.M. - New Music - More Music Videos

I fear for the future of my profession. Part I

The IR blogging community's response to Andrew Exum's (rather insipid) manifesto, which Will ably collects here, illustrates something I have been contemplating for a while: the talismanic status of quantitative analysis in contemporary study of international politics. Consider Drew Conway's response (I don't intend this to be a dig at Drew Conway, who by all appearances is an intelligent, thoughtful, and highly-skilled individual. I focus on his post because I think his response is representative of median IR-man. I could equally pick on Will, but I do that enough already).

(edited for content, 5:23)

Drew advances a positive case for quantitative IR based entirely on first principles. Yet, the issue isn't whether statistical analysis can in theory produce good knowledge (of course it can). A scientific defense of quantitative IR is empirical: what original knowledge has this approach to the study of conflict (and IPE, for that matter) produced that is both substantively important and generally accepted as "true?" And is this knowledge better than the knowledge which would have been produced had we dedicated those same resources to studying conflict using an alternative method? And not only does Q-IR not have an answer to this question, but its adherence to first-principle defenses suggests that quantitative IR doesn't recognize that this is the question. This suggests that quantitative IR has ceased to be a method (a tool scholars employ when it is best suited to answer the question at hand). Quantitative IR has become dogma: Q-IR believes it offers the best possible answer to every question.

And thus I fear for the future of my profession because it is becoming (or has become already) a primitive religion based upon a methods fetish. It believes that statistical methods have a magical power to deliver truth. It thinks it need not demonstrate that quantitative analysis is better than alternatives because first principles (faith) tell practitioners that statistical analysis is always better than the alternatives. It clings to methods because it believes that therein lies the discipline's salvation. Now, as a Vermonter and a skeptic, I never paid all that much attention to religion. But I do seem to recall some sort of admonition against the worship of false idols.

That's a Nice Straw Man You've Got There

So this Andrew Exum post bashing the use of quantitative methodologies in IR research has gotten a lot of play in the IR blogosphere. (Aside: it was sure nice of him to write a manifesto for those of us who use stats in our analysis... would he mind if I wrote one for him?) The Foreign Policy bloggers are split: Stephen Walt got a thrill from it while Drezner thinks it's "unadulterated horsesh*t". Parts of it, at least.

Drezner also posts to this nice rebuttal from Drew Conway, which I solicited on Twitter, and received. My goal was to tag-team with Conway and unite the American grad school IR blogosphere in solidarity, but I got busy. Now that's it's all in the news, tho, I'll sacrifice a half-hour of sleep and pipe up.

Look, it's obvious that, like all straw men, there's a small shred of truth in what Exum is saying. This, for example, could have come verbatim from all of our Scope and Methods instructors' mouths on the first day of grad school:

I will use quantitative analysis in conjunction with theory and qualitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis.

It's true, but it's banal. In fact, I would argue that people with solid training in quantitative methods have a much, much stronger skepticism towards statistical results than people without it. Moreover, we actually have reason to be skeptical, since (unlike Exum) we know what we're talking about. Do some do bad work? Of course they do. Does Exum think that every policy analyst using qualitative methods (or no systematic methods at all) perfectly avoid mistakes? I hope not.

But more importantly, if the above statement is true and meaningful than its corollary must also be:

I will use qualitative analysis in conjunction with theory and quantitative analysis to describe what I see as phenomena in war and peace. I will be honest about the limits of both my theory and my analysis.

And yet Exum purposefully rejects this statement when he rejects the validity of quantitative analysis.

But wait... it gets weirder:

In war and peace, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value.

Again, to the extent that this is true it's trivial: that's not the claim that quantitative researchers make. At. All. Second, Exum's statement as written is generalizable to any field of inquiry and any systematic methodology. Somehow I doubt he'd sign a manifesto that included the statement "In physics, the variables are infinite, and not everything can be measured or assigned a numerical value". Why? Because he recognizes that despite the fact that the models that physicists build are simplifications of the universe, based on assumptions which are almost certainly false, with tons of missing information, they nevertheless have significant value in explaining causal processes. It's as if Exum wishes to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

So Exum must be claiming one of two things: 1. social systems cannot be studied systematically; 2. the scientific method is wrong. I don't want to put words in his mouth so I'll let him pick which one represents his true belief, but either one is absurd. Especially since he criticizes the exact same attitude among sports journalists. (After I typed that I noticed that Justin Logan nailed this point even harder: Exum doesn't believe in science.) But there's more:

I will not use numbers to signify what are fundamentally qualitative assessments without acknowledging to my reader that I have done so in order to satisfy a departmental requirement, gain tenure, or get published in the APSR. Or because I have been in graduate school for so long that I have forgotten how to effectively write in prose.

This is... I can't... ... ... sigh. For one thing it's slander. (At least I think it is; it makes so little sense that I'm having trouble understanding what he means. What's a "fundamentally qualitative assessment", for example?) For another it's wrong. The first part of the first sentence is provably wrong in the context of Bayesian analysis, but I wouldn't expect Exum to know that. The second sentence is just rude. More importantly, it just doesn't represent the motivation of anyone I know, and it doesn't accurately characterize the discipline. Are we motivated by getting and keeping our jobs? Yes. Who isn't? We're also motivated by trying to learn more about the world, which is why we're doing this instead of getting MBAs and making a bunch more money. If Exum is saying that quantitative social scientists as a class of people, like every other class of people in every other profession including qualitative researchers and policy professionals, market their work for their audience, then he's right. (Although it's common practice in the quantitative IR literature to list one's problematic assumptions, discuss the limitations in one's results, mention alternative interpretations, and propose ways in which to extend and falsify the claims made. But Exum wouldn't know that because he refuses to read it.) Again... what's the point?

I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do.

Fine. I recognize that they know how to fight and kill people better than I do, and I've never read or heard a quantitative researcher claim othewise. But I know a lot of service-people -- including some officers -- who know far less than I do about the causes of war and how to avoid it, and conflict isn't even my subfield! I know officers, serving today, who are very good at their operational jobs and yet believe that Saddam Hussein was allied with Iran to help al Qaeda attack the United States or somesuch nonsense. I know some servicepeople who believe every statistic they hear, and some that don't believe any of them. We're good at different things.

Considering the immense recent mistakes made by the American administrations, in which not a single quant had a high-ranking position but plenty of experienced policy professionals did, and the ongoing abject failure that is American foreign policy, I'm just not all that amused by Exum's cheekiness on this point. Those mistakes could not have been justified using quantitative methodologies, but came perfectly naturally to people relying on their experience to make qualitative judgments. I really have a hard time buying the notion that the quant researchers are the ones with too much hubris in the foreign policy community.

Walt responds to all of this with this bizarre statement:

Wise words indeed. I’d just add that Nobel prize-winning economist and strategic guru Thomas Schelling offered a similar warning in The Strategy of Conflict, cautioning against any tendency “to treat the subject of strategy as though it were, or should be, solely a branch of mathematics.”

But... we don't. I dare Exum or Walt to show me an IR scholar who treats strategy solely as a branch of mathematics. Mathematics is a tool. It's a language that allows us to organize facts in a systematic manner in order to make judgments. Like any tool it can be used well or poorly. But when used properly it can do things that other tools cannot, which is why Thomas Schelling used mathematics.

All I'm saying is... there's a lot of data in the world, and we can learn a lot from it. We have learned a lot from it. Eschewing that in favor of one's own experience or intuition or ideological biases seems like a really irresponsible choice. Doing that and then accusing others of willfully obfuscating for personal gain is slanderous. Disregarding quantitative work out of hand is logically fallacious.

That's a helluva trifecta. I wouldn't want it under my name.

The Eye of the Beholder

From a (surprisingly) good David Broder column:

From too many years of covering politics, I have come to believe as Axiom One that the absolute worst advice politicians ever receive comes from journalists who fancy themselves great campaign strategists.

Really? And all this time I thought the worst advice came from social scientists. I guess it all depends on where you're sitting.

What Do Americans Want?

Will Wilkinson argues that Americans don't value the type of government spending that we get:

My sense is that, despite the U.S.’s historically relatively modest level of government spending, the composition of U.S. spending is such that U.S. taxpayers get less of value in return for their tax dollars than do taxpayers in many places with higher taxes and higher levels of government spending. Which is to say that when using GDP per capita as a proxy for welfare, the U.S. comes off better than it should relative to, say, Canada or Sweden. ...

The U.S. is an notable anomaly in the happiness data. Average self-reported life satisfaction rose with GDP per capita over the last several decades in almost all wealthy liberal democracies, but not so much in the U.S. The idea that the unusual composition of U.S. government spending gives Americans unusually poor value for their tax dollars might help explain this.

I think this is exactly wrong. Americans constantly complain about nebulous government waste, true, but they complain even more loudly whenever anyone proposes cutting anything. Wilkinson cites military spending, airport security, and education as examples of wasteful spending that make Americans unhappy. Does he think that a politician could be elected running on a platform of decreasing American military spending, cutting education, and slashing airport security? Of course not. If Americans truly didn't value those things, then this should not be so.

How this compares cross-nationally I don't know. I don't think it's implausible that different polities demand different types of government spending from their governments, but that to me that backs up my point: in democracies, the level of and composition of public expenditure is roughly what the media voter prefers. Is there any reason to expect the median voter in Canada to demand the same things as the median voter in America? Is there any reason to expect the median voter in America to be happier if the US government changed its budget to reflect Canadian preferences? Why does Wilkinson think that the French get what they want out of government spending but that Americans do not? What sort of model of politics is he using? These are not things that Wilkinson wants, of course, but his very next post is about how democracy means never getting everything you want.

I think a better explanation is that Americans do value security, military predominance, and public education very highly, and the reason why self-reported happiness is lower is because the country has had a very rough decade pretty much across the board. Terrorist attacks, two wars, a lost decade economically, increasing income inequality, rapidly deteriorating public and private finances... the naughties were hard on America, especially after the post-Cold War euphoria and economic boom of the 1990s.

Oh Blather

Today an anonymous commenter writes in response to an old post,

Chavez and Morales are sooooooooo crazy, huh, professor. And the IMF and UN have been helping Haiti all this time using values we, as Americans, stringently hold; subjugating any aspect of the earth until we can target it with mega machinery and the vultures who prey on the carcass of the third world. Earthquake machine? What else would you call the Bush administration? Your complicity with the Heritage Foundation is showing.

I pull this comment from obscurity because it nicely illustrates why my fellow citizens are incapable of engaging in reasoned discourse about anything important. The reaction is incoherent ethos; logos makes no appearance. What exactly is this person trying to say? Is it that Chavez isn't crazy because the commenter believes that the US actually has an earthquake machine? Or is the commenter being metaphorical, as in the Bush administration was an earthquake machine. In this case I don't understand how that applies to Haiti's earthquake, which occurred long after President Obama's inauguration. And so asserting that the Bush administration wreaked havoc doesn't make Chavez any less crazy for asserting that the US has an earthquake machine. Finally, whether I am complicit with the Heritage Foundation is irrelevant to my belief that the assertion that the US has an earthquake machine is just plain nutty. No matter how I parse it, therefore, the only thing the comment demonstrates is that the commenter is too lazy to develop a logically coherent point. But, such laziness doesn't prevent the commenter from vomiting all over our blog. Next time you disagree with something we write, please take as much time as you need to be logically coherent.

Thanks, the Professor

PSA

The new Comparative Political Studies is out, and I'd like to highlight a few articles (before I've read them) that might interest IPE@UNC readers. First, Kelemen and Vogel (earlier ungated draft here) argue that "regulatory politics" best explains the shifting positions of the US and EU on environmental regulatory policy. Abstract:

When environmental issues emerged on the international agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was of one of the strongest and most consistent supporters of international environmental treaties and agreements. The member states of the European Union subsequently ratified all the international treaties created in this period, but U.S. leadership was crucial and European states were laggards in many cases. Since the 1990s, the political dynamics of international environmental policy have shifted, with the European Union emerging as a global environmental leader and the United States repeatedly opposing multilateral environmental agreements. The authors argue that a "regulatory politics" model that synthesizes the effects of domestic politics and international regulatory competition provides the most powerful explanation of why the United States and European Union have "traded places" with respect to their support for international environmental agreements.

From-the-hip thought: I wonder if greater European integration over the past 40 years has increased the demand for provision of public goods in the EU states, especially since some nations will pay more for them than others.

Second, Levitz and Pop-Eleches have an article (ungated version here) on the (surprising?) lack of backsliding of new EU states. Abstract:

This article documents and explains the puzzling lack of backsliding in political reforms among the new postcommunist EU members, even though these countries are no longer subject to the powerful incentives of the EU membership promise. Using a combination of cross-national statistics, expert interviews, and public opinion data, the authors show that the new EU members have experienced at most a slowdown in reforms rather than a genuine backlash. The authors attribute this finding to the fact that the loss of leverage after the countries joined the European Union was balanced by a combination of alternative leverage and linkage mechanisms, including greater dependence on EU aid and trade and greater exposure to the West for both elites and ordinary citizens. For the latter, expanded work and travel opportunities seem to be associated with higher expectations of government performance and greater political involvement, which may be crucial for future governance reform in the region.

The IMF Tries to Take the Teeth Out of the IMF

Emmanuel passes along this article on the changing culture in the IMF:

The International Monetary Fund is considering a new multibillion dollar lending arrangement it would deploy during crises, which would offer money to countries even if they don't ask for it.

Under the "multicountry credit line," the IMF would, for the first time, make money available to groups of countries that it believes are in danger during financial crises, rather than individual nations, said a senior IMF official.

The previous m.o. of the IMF was to make their loans as unattractive as possible to reduce moral hazard. But in recent days the Fund seems more interested in staying relevant:

The credit-line concept represents further rethinking on the part of the IMF of how it should operate to ward off or handle crises. During the past few weeks, the IMF has suggested that countries might aim for a higher level of inflation than central banks traditionally do, and that countries might consider using taxes and regulation to limit surges of capital that could inflate asset bubbles. Both suggestions go against years of IMF doctrine.

During the recent global recession, the IMF eased its usual requirements that countries slash spending or raise interest rates in order to qualify for rescue loans.

It also created a new loan, called the flexible credit line, for countries whose general economic policies passed IMF review. Those countries didn't have to meet specific IMF requirements to get approved.

So what to make of this? Does this represent an internal ideological shift of the proper role of the IMF, or is the Fund trying to carve out a greater role for itself in the global political economy? As the WSJ article notes, the Fund is seemingly try to remove the "stigma" of participating in a loan program, but why? Is the IMF trying to move from its pseudo-position as "international lender of last resort" to a position as "lender of ... resort"?

I have to say, I'm somewhat bemused by this. Despite initial fanfare, the new, kinder, gentler IMF hasn't gotten all that much action during this crisis. After much fanfare over the new "flexible credit line" (now with fewer conditions!) only Mexico, Columbia, and Poland applied for it. The news that Germany and France are moving towards taking care of Greece's debt on their own calls the IMF's relevance into further question.

I guess I'm just a bit unsure of what this really means. Is this an example of the IMF following the wishes of its constituent governments (since the financial crisis began in, and is primarily focused in, Western industrialized and semi-industrialized states)? Pop-Eleches might argue that. Or does it simply represent a further ideological shift away from neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus? Jeffrey Chwieroth might argue that. Or is it just a pitch for continued relevance by the Fund itself?

Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the IMF can step in and parse this. Vreelander?